Books to Die For
On the one hand you want to make a unique recommendation, instead of citing yet another of the usual suspects on the best-seller list. On the other, I’ve learned that a writer’s taste doesn’t always match his readers’, even when he writes popular books. What surprises a writer often seems far-fetched or absurd to a reader, and vice versa.
This may be because people who earn their living by writing often lose the ability to read with their hearts alone. I, for one, can never read a thriller without automatically turning on my analytical eye, and trying to figure out what’s going on—or how the author has somehow managed to handcuff me to my chair.
The request for a recommendation is a classic dilemma. My preference would be to suggest something only a few people know about, but that has what it takes to become an international best seller. That’s where Harlan Coben comes into play, at least if you live in Germany.
Although stacks of his editions proliferate in the rest of the world—a compelling reason for me not to recommend something—he has not (yet) sold in Germany in amounts comparable to the superstars of our literary world. As far as I know, his book Tell No One has only scratched the best-seller list, and I became aware of it only by accident, through a book club’s special edition. Like many before me, however, I devoured it in a single day, even though Coben writes anything but “fast-food literature.”
Like any good thriller, Tell No One even begins with a haunting “what if?” question, one that no ordinary mortal ever wants to confront but that will hold us in thrall for hundreds of pages. Tell No One’s question is as follows:
What if, one day, you receive an email from the love of your life, years after you saw her kidnapped and murdered by a serial killer?
This is exactly what happens to the pediatrician David Beck.
Every summer on the same day, David and his wife, Elizabeth, travel to the lakeside spot where they kissed for the first time at the age of twelve. And every year they leave an additional line in the bark of “their” tree, just below the heart carved with their initials (EP + DB).
On their twelfth anniversary, shortly after the stroke of 1:00 p.m., fate, in the form of a serial killer, intervenes. David is struck unconscious, and Elizabeth is kidnapped. Later, her mangled body is found.
Eight years after the tragedy, David gets an email. The subject is clear: “EP + DB,” followed by thirteen strokes. And the content of the email consists of a single command: “TELL NO ONE!”
Harlan Coben is described, not inaccurately, as a master of multidimensional plotting, although this is faint praise, as we shall shortly see. But he is, in any case, also a gifted high-voltage architect who has constructed this novel perfectly from foundation to roof.
Many good thrillers start with exceptional “what if?” questions. The genius of Tell No One’s is that the story that follows from this question, while not obvious, is so well written that it can be understood by almost every reader. Michael Crichton could conjure up a futuristic thriller from it, and if Stephen King asked this question, his answer would probably spirit us away into unreal worlds of horror. But with Coben, the horror stays real and present. And herein lies the attraction of this journey, a psychological nightmare that pushes the hero, David Beck, to the limits of human endurance.
With this email from the dead, Coben has a brilliant premise. Great, but the idea on its own serves only as a blurb to encourage us to pick up the book. A single idea, even a brilliant one, is not a unique selling point, nor does it make the book a thriller worth reading. The best “what if?” question is wasted if the author doesn’t understand his craft, or if he cannot create exceptional characters, brought to life with his own unique style.
In the summer of 2010, I had the pleasure of meeting Harlan Coben personally at ThrillerFest in New York. In the course of a panel discussion, he told the audience that each of his stories begins not with the plot, but with the characters. Tell No One offers proof of this, for it is not only the main characters that stand out: Coben strives to draw tangible, realistic portraits of even the apparently least important and most marginal of figures. This requires no thick brushstrokes, no pagelong explanations of design, history, social status, or the like. Sometimes a rough sketch is enough to enshrine the person forever in the reader’s memory, as at the beginning of the book’s second chapter, when Coben introduces us to the hero’s grandfather.
Many authors would have been content to mention in an aside that the grandfather suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Instead, Coben gives us this:
His mind is a bit like an old black-and-white TV with damaged rabbit-ear antennas. He goes in and out and some days are better than others and you have to hold the antennas a certain way and not move at all, and even then the picture does the intermittent vertical spin.
Two sentences, and the scourge of this disease is perfectly drawn for each reader to understand.
But good metaphors and vivid comparisons can be found in many works. So what, exactly, makes Coben’s style so unique, so distinctive, and, ultimately, so successful? This question is answered most easily with a look at his acknowledgments. I had always skimmed these lists of (to me) meaningless names, which for male authors traditionally end with a mention of the understanding wife who so patiently and selflessly endured her partner’s social incompetence during the writing period.
At the end of his thriller Just One Look, however, Coben ends his acknowledgments with this, after expressing his thanks for the advice of renowned experts: “As always, if there are errors, technical or otherwise, the fault is with these people. I’m tired of being the fall guy.”
Nerve, at a level that I didn’t expect, and an expression of thanks that makes me laugh. No, even better, a note of thanks that wasn’t the usual Oscar acceptance speech blah-blah, but actually told me something about the experts behind the name on the cover. It also told me that the writer had a sense of humor, and his characters do as well.
It is this humor that runs through Coben’s work and makes it so distinctive—that he can, for example, show us the embattled hero of Tell No One wrestling with his fate in this self-deprecating way:
I know I flirt with being an alcoholic. I also know that flirting with alcoholism is about as safe as flirting with a mobster’s underage daughter.
Humor and suspense—which in theory go together about as well as toothpaste and orange juice—work perfectly in Coben’s fictional reality.
Without descending to the level of an action comedy, Coben’s wordplay approaches stand-up quality (“The makeup artist gasped in horror when he saw Shauna. ‘What are those bags under your eyes?’ he cried. ‘Are we doing a shoot for Samsonite luggage now?’ ”). Coben gets us to laugh without sacrificing momentum or turning the story into something grotesque, which would be very easy with a plot as complicated as that of Tell No One.
The problem faced by authors is almost always that of squaring the circle. We must invent realistic figures that are still quite exceptional. Frankly, most people in real life aren’t suitable templates for heroes. And most heroes in fiction are so exaggerated that, in real life, they’d look like aliens.
Coben builds these figures (real but not boring, unusual but not farfetched) primarily through everyday language, and particularly through dialogue. Injecting humor into a thriller is no simple feat. A wisecracking hero on the run can be funny, but he’s more likely to be laughable. Not with Coben. In his books, if a shady ex-junkie offers the hero help, it sounds like this:
“Something bad’s happening with you, Doc.” He spread his arms. “Bad is my world. I’m the best tour guide there is.”
A wise man once said that every great story is a family story. Tell No One supports this theory, with its external action driven by the question of whether the impossible can be possible and David Beck’s wife can still be alive. That this thriller has room for a deeper story, dealing with the effects of tragedy on the bereaved, is an impressive feat given Coben’s breakneck pace. This pace makes it al
most impossible to introduce a character over several pages, but Coben shows us that’s not necessary. Do you need more than this to understand the character of lawyer Hester Crimstein?
“Good. Look, Beck, you’re a doctor, right?”
“Right.”
“You good at bedside manner?”
“I try to be.”
“I don’t. Not even a little. You want coddling, go on a diet and hire Richard Simmons. So let’s skip all the pardon-mes and excuse-mes and all that objectionable crap, okay? Just answer my questions.”
Okay, I admit I’m a fan—you’ve probably guessed that already—and fans tend to idealize the works of their idols. For me it’s even worse, I’m afraid. To categorize my remarks here accurately, I must confess that Coben’s works have shaped my career as a writer—especially Tell No One.
Before I became a writer, I worked as program director of a Top 40 station in Berlin. Because I wasn’t a host myself I didn’t have to put my face in the window, but I could pull the strings, which was a very comfortable situation. Even as a drummer in my (not very successful) band, I was used to staying in the background while setting the beat. When I submitted my first thriller, Therapy, to an agent, I did so under the name “Paul Lucas.” Standing in the back row was so deeply ingrained in me that I didn’t want to put myself forward in my writing, either. The pseudonym was a cowardly shield.
My agent put his head in his hands and tried to persuade me to use my real name, as they tell us to do these days on Facebook. At that stage I didn’t have a contract; I read Coben’s books, including the acknowledgments, and was once again reminded that no one can become a good writer without 100 percent commitment, and no one can create lifelike characters if they’re hiding from life themselves.
On those grounds, you won’t find any somber biographical texts on my home page, and my acknowledgments are slightly different—as, for example, in my psychological thriller The Eye Collector, where I’ve printed photos next to the names, so that for once a reader can get a clear picture of all the people whose help goes into the creation of a book.
For writers like me, then, Coben provides inspiration in more ways than one. My first impulse is to lay one of his books down in the middle of a chapter and sit at my own desk in the hope of producing something of similar quality. (The author-as-reader, however, brooks no interruption before finishing the story, with all of its punch lines.)
That said, I’m often asked whether writers who read their colleagues’ work don’t run the risk of imitating it, if only subconsciously. The answer is a resounding yes—and no. To be perfectly honest, after I read Tell No One for the first time, at the very beginning of my career, I deliberately tried to give my work “the Coben touch.” They were the two worst paragraphs I’ve ever written, and immediately went into the trash.
So Coben has not influenced my style, but he’s saved me from writer’s block in one way or another. When I stare at the cursor on my screen and have no ideas, I grab a good book. I don’t get ideas that way. But it’s better for my mood than sitting in frustration at the computer.
So often successful writers (read: writers who no longer need a second job to pay their rent) forget why we wanted to get to this point. Deadlines, readings, reviews, interviews, sales figures, and trillions of other distractions mean that we no longer see the differences between the best job of our lives and any regular job. We originally wanted (read: while we were being rejected by every publishing house) to tell a story that was important to us, one that would entertain people. I could be wrong, but when I read Coben I see this desire in every one of his books, and so I am reminded of my own goals when I first sat down at my desk, hell-bent on becoming a writer.
Thus, for me, Harlan Coben is not only an author, but a motivator. For thrill-seeking readers, he tells a great story. For authors, he gives this important writing tip: differentiate yourself. Do it differently.
If you’re funny, write funny, even if the subject is tragic. If you want to change perspectives (Tell No One is written partly in the first person, and partly in the third) then do it, even if the so-called experts tell you that this doesn’t work, as an editor in a large publishing house once tried to convince me. My reference to Tell No One did nothing to help, because the editor (in Germany, of course) had not read Coben. But—and this is crucial—differentiating oneself also means differentiating oneself from Coben.
To sum up, for its inconsistencies alone Tell No One is a “book to die for” for me. It starts with a question that sounds almost supernatural, but leads to a real story, which leads to a logical ending. It’s about extraordinary people we have never met in real life, but take at face value. And it is funny, even in places where we resist any further stimulation.
With this book Coben has not invented a new genre, but he has pushed the boundaries toward new frontiers. It makes him one of the few popular authors whose style can be recognized without looking at the name on the cover.
And it makes him my favorite “inside tip” whenever readers ask whose books I would recommend. I fear that it’s only a matter of time, however, before I can no longer play this trump card because soon most of the people in the room will have read his books.
You can’t keep good books down forever, not even in Germany.
People who see Sebastian Fitzek for the first time say that he doesn’t look anything like a psychothriller author, but that’s definitely his passion. Sebastian Fitzek, born in 1971 in Berlin (where he still lives), is one of the most-read thriller authors in Germany, despite his harmless appearance. His books are now read in twenty-five countries, including the United States (with his first novel, Therapy), even though he originally wanted to be a drummer, a tennis player, or a veterinarian. In each of these cases he failed because he was all thumbs, as he admits himself. He is married to Sandra, and is the father of two little children. Visit him online at www.sebastianfitzek.de.
Mystic River
by Dennis Lehane (2001)
CHRIS MOONEY
* * *
Dennis Lehane (b. 1965) is one of the most highly regarded mystery writers of his generation, described by Michael Connelly as the “heir apparent” to Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Irish immigrant parents, he has used the city as the setting for most of his novels, including his series of six books featuring the private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro; The Given Day, his historical novel centered on the Boston police strike of 1919; and the hugely acclaimed Mystic River (2001). Unusually, he has been well served by film, and Mystic River, Shutter Island, and Gone Baby Gone have all been the recipients of high-profile and careful adaptations.
* * *
When I was around eleven or so, my grandfather got a part-time job delivering flowers. I accompanied him periodically, and the bulk of our deliveries were in Boston’s blue-collar, and predominately Irish Catholic, neighborhoods. The people living in the apartment buildings and sagging, paint-chipped triple-deckers reminded me of the people from my neighborhood in Lynn, a city less than seventeen miles north of Boston: fathers covered in grease and plaster dust smoking and sharing beers with friends as the Red Sox game played from portable radios; mothers off to the corner grocery store or stopping to “shoot the shit” with neighbors while kids played street hockey or tossed a baseball or, on some blocks, cooled off in a spray of water from an opened hydrant.
The front doors opened to muggy air thick with cigarette smoke and stale cooking odors baked into the wallpaper, and the people who greeted me wore polite but forced smiles. What I remember most, even now, were the stares. Not hostile, necessarily, but guarded. They watched me from doorways and, sometimes, windows, but always on the street. I felt their collective glares the moment I stepped out of the van. I asked my grandfather about it.
“Lots of things happen around here,” he told me. “Not necessarily good things, you know? People living here are wary of outsiders, and they’ve got good reason to be. They’v
e got to keep their eyes and ears open.”
“Because of Whitey Bulger?” I asked. Whitey, the head of the Irish mob, was at that time viewed as South Boston’s version of Robin Hood—someone who kept the streets safe, and clean of drugs and crime. This was 1980. Another fifteen years would pass until the truth came out: that Whitey Bulger was not only Boston’s most powerful and notorious mobster but also the city’s most prolific serial killer, all while being the FBI’s top-echelon informant.
My grandfather shrugged, the signal that my question may or may not have some validity, and with that the conversation was officially over, not to be discussed further or brought up at any point in the future. Those secretive Boston neighborhoods I visited that summer cast a powerful allure over me and made me want to know more about the people who lived there: their stories, what they had seen and endured, and the lengths they went to in order to protect themselves and their families.
Dennis Lehane, having grown up in Dorchester, explored these neighborhoods, to great success, with his excellent detective series featuring Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. After five books, he took a break from his popular characters and wrote Mystic River. Thank God he did. That book, a hybrid of pulp and literary fiction, lifted the veil of secrecy shrouding these tight-knit Irish clans and offered an insider’s view of their “code of silence” street ethic. Not an easy task, but Lehane accomplished it with such incredible authenticity that Mystic River became Boston’s definitive novel, and a gold standard by which all crime fiction can be judged.
Lehane shrewdly opens his masterpiece in 1975, focusing on three boys living in East Buckingham, a fictional city located along the shore of Boston’s Mystic River. The city is as claustrophobic as the real Boston neighborhoods on which it’s based: cramped corner stores and small playgrounds, Irish bars, and local butchers, a place where everyone knows your name and your personal business. Sean Devine, from the upper-class area known as the Point, is smart and destined for college. Jimmy Marcus, fearless, tough, and streetwise, seems destined for a life of crime. And Dave Boyle, a boy being raised by a single mother, seems destined for . . . well, nothing. Dave is that boy we can barely recall from our own childhoods, a nameless and faceless shadow whose sole trait is an aching, desperate need to be liked. When a pair of roving sexual predators posing as police officers pull up next to the boys, they target the weakest prey, Dave, who, although scared and crying, willingly climbs into the backseat of a car that “smells of apples.”